From June through December 2020, I taught myself Shiny and ended up creating a pretty complicated interactive dashboard for exploring dialect variation across the US. Here’s a bit about my experience using Shiny, as well as the app itself for you to play around with.
The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (YGDP) has been collecting survey data about syntax diversity in U.S. English for over five years.
You can read about the YGDP’s work here, but in a nutshell:
We put out surveys online to learn about people’s dialects across the United States
We ask survey participants to judge whether test sentences, such as “Here’s you a piece of pizza”, seem acceptable in casual conversation.
We’re not interested in “proper” or “correct” English–we want to know how people actually talk in real life across the country.
(If you want to learn about the survey and data analysis methods in great detail, check out the